Today's front page story in the Technology supplement - Fuel costs 16p per mile. Why? - looks at how the performance of cars really hasn't improved so much in the 100 years since the Ford Model T rolled off the assembly line (the assembly line itself being an innovation).

Yes, fuel prices at the pump are high in absolute terms. Yet when you compare them over time and adjust for inflation, some surprising results emerge.

Using data from the AA, with prices (for four-star fuel) going back to 1903, and mixing in the inflation data (which goes back to 1750, though cars don't), you get the graph below, showing the real price of fuel over the past century. (Update: graph corrected for decimalisation in 1971. Sorry about that.)

It turns out that the most expensive time to buy fuel - in real terms - was 1917 (wars do that); there was a dip during the Great Depression and after the war (when probably there weren't that many people able to afford cars, so plentiful supply but not much demand means lower prices). Even the oil shock of 1973 turns out not to be so bad.

The all-time historical low seems to have been
1978
- 1949 because it's hard to believe that prices are going to go down from here. (And compared to 1978, the most recent low, inflation-adjusted prices in 2005 were 45% up on the 1978 low. I don't think it's coming back.) (This hasn't changed despite my initial decimalisation screwup, which overstated pre-1971 prices by a factor of 2.4.)

And what about prices now? If we use the same inflation figures and compare prices for unleaded petrol and diesel (source: Department of Transport), we discover that 2007 (the last year for which prices and inflation data are available) wasn't the most expensive year - 2000 was. Hmm, did people get upset about fuel prices that year?

Update: now added in the data for 2008, assuming an inflation multiplier of 1 (which is near enough, at 3% inflation). Data from the AA for the fuel prices this year. Yes, fuel is more expensive than for ages, in real terms.

So what do we conclude? Surprisingly, that we aren't - in
relative
historical terms - as badly off as we feel we are.
Note though that these data don't include the current year, when prices really have been shooting up. We'll see if we can update them in the future.

Update: though these graphs are based on *prices*, it might be more useful - if we're data-wrangling - to have a comparison with earning power. If anyone can point me to some data for median earnings for the past century, we could plot fuel prices against that.

In the meantime, has the price of fuel made you change your driving habits? And has seeing these graphs reassured you even slightly?

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